Dealing with pain and loss.

[Engel]

[color=#40826D][size=1]Most people take pain as being evil, as a bad thing, a thing that should be avoided. Pain of any kind, physical, emotional, mental, environmental, any form. What most people don't realize, is that pain fosters growth. I am sitting at my laptop, at 4:56 AM on a Sunday morning, on June 24th, and I am in pain. It's pain of an emotional kind. It' the pain of loss, of insecurity, of a wound that I will bear for the rest of my days. I do not regret this pain, for as I've come to think upon it, pain is as much of a blessing as love. Without pain, there can be no growth. Sometimes, when we experience exceptionally bad pain, it stays with us. Old war scars, some might say, that still ache upon a cold, rainy day. Be it rain and clouds of the heart, or rain and clouds of the sky. This pain I have felt is of the former, and it is allowing me to grow, to think in new ways.

When we are attached to something so long, be it a possession, a way of thinking, a person, and it is taken away, that creates a void. From that void, comes pain. It makes us want to break down and cry, and we tend to take things at face value. I, myself, tend to ask the world, "Why?" Why separate me from what I love, what I hold dear, what I have become attached to?

Everything has it's time. Love is the most beautiful thing when it's alive, and when it dies, it's the most ugly thing on Earth - or anywhere else. I don't know about other worlds, other life, other cultures, but nothing is impossible. In fact such questions are what I come to ask myself when I experience pain.

I am in no sense, a masochist. I do not take enjoyment out of my pain. I simply use it to try and understand my surroundings, myself, and other people better. When I remember all the days when I wasn't in pain, it makes them so much sweeter, and when I remember the days that I was in pain, it gives me time to think. If you survive the pain, you should learn from it, become a better person for it. Physical pain may foster the time for emotional growth, and emotional pain may find time for mental growth.

I realize, right now, as I sit here at 5:04 AM, that I am being rather vague. I am being vague on purpose. I do not know how people besides myself experience pain and loss, I only know myself. And I still don't know myself as half as well as I should like. But I will try to be more concise with the way I am talking.

When you lose someone, it's like part of you has gone missing. You want so desperately to find that part, to sew yourself back together. However, in that search, you may find another "part", another person, who fits and understands and communicates better with you. You share past experiences, and you reminisce about the windy days of the heart, and you grow closer. Pain brings everyone a little closer, allowing them to share their hearts where they might otherwise be closed.

All pain may seem to end, and a lot of it does. But, as I had said earlier, some pain says locked away, to come back and ache on a rainy day. And I realize, again, at 5:07 AM, that that line is pretentiously corny, and also rhymed.

I guess, what I've been trying to say is, when you lose something, take your time to grieve, take your time to mourn, and please, please move on. You cannot hold onto the past forever, but you can let your past bring your future to fruition, let those old war scars allow you to swap tales with people and become closer, become better people.

I hope I haven't rambled on too long. I was inspired to write this after a few long hours of thinking, and I wanted to share it with others. Just to see their point of view, and offer advice, and frankly, get advice. So please, comment if you wish, but just think about what I've said.[/color][/size]

[DeadSeraphim]

[size=1][color=indigo][font=arial]One word: alcohol.[/font][/color][/size]

[pooperson]

[SIZE=1][COLOR=DeepSkyBlue]I use Jesus. He helps me a bit.

[quote name='Romans 8:8']And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him[/quote]
[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[affection]

Pain is something many people can't seem to handle. It's nice to hear that there are still people who can handle their own pain (either mental or physical). Some run to drinking (as it is a form of depressant), some take pills (either OD or depression pills), some have to take it all in because they have no one to talk to, and some.... can't handle pain at all. It's incredible how many different forms people handle pain.

But without pain and loss, how would you ever appreciate love and life?

[Revelation]

[size=1][color=#8B008B]I understand what you're going through. I can't believe this happened though...I am just taken aback and just utterly surprised. Surprised is an understatement but I suppose that fits.

As for advice, keep living life. It'll hurt like nothing you've ever felt but you have to move on even though you feel like you're tearing apart on the inside. I couldn't tell you from experience since I've never felt this but looking at others and from what I've heard, it really will hurt.

Just try your best and live your life. If need be, you can always talk to me, Spence. Just try not to bottle it up and I'm sure you're trying not to but sometimes, unconsciously, people tend to do that. I'm sure, in time, everything will be alright.[/size][/color]

[Guest Copycatalyst]

Pain is meant to make you grow. Suffering is meant to make you grow. Most let it sever them and they ash in the cobalt of the flames of their own fading phoenix. But not I, and nor do you have to; for it's your choice! Man's condemned to freedom, and you're condemned to the freedom of pain and suffering, especially unnecessary sufferings, which the world has never tried to minimalize as much as possible. It's kind of like what my old buddy the Buddha said. It's like everyone's asking "Who took this from me? Why am I alive?" It's as if each man is shot with an arrow, and they want to know who shot it, and who hit it, and what make and model it is, and if it can be put under arrest; and that arrow is called mortality, in better terms it's called [i]being alive[/i]. If all realized the greatness that is life, rather than us mass producing a large quantity of people, and letting the quality people you know--kind of just have to smelter in this hellpit of cesspooling idiocy, maybe things would be different. But yes. Pain is for you to grow. As is suffering. Master pain, master suffering, and realize it's only negative if you give it that schemataic label in your mind, and you shall rise above, and shine as a brilliant sun of men for a time. It's what Jesus did. And they put him on the cross. But that's okay. We all know everyone is on a cross, and it's called their own cross-eyed nihilism and disvaluation of what life really is. What life really is is something you have to find in your own time, of course, but it's Dionysianly apparent that it's beautiful and the easiest way to justify life is as an aesthetical phenomenon. Like a work of art making itself.

It is Just Ill, and the severance of injust ill, that I proclaim!

[Fasteriskhead]

[SIZE=1]Pain, I think, has nothing to do with growth. Think of a situation where I, say, break up with a significant other. I don't learn anything (or "grow") at all from the [i]pain[/i] of the breakup; if I learn something or become less naive it's from the breakup [i]itself[/i], from thinking about why it happened, where it started, etc.. I don't become stronger or "less resistant" to pain, either - things like breakups never get easier, at best I can only learn how to handle them better. The idea that pain makes us grow seems to me like an after-the-fact justification for really awful feelings that need to be explained and given reason [i]somehow[/i], even if those reasons have nothing to do with the actual, concrete experience of hurt.

(If you wanted to be ambitious, you could probably find the roots of this in the old solution to the problem of theodicy: "why is there evil in the world? because it's ultimately part of God's plan for the kingdom." The goal taken by "pain-as-growth" is personal virtue rather than universal salvation, but the model's basically the same)

I tend to think that if you want to understand pain, the way to do it is to examine, as closely as possible, pain as an [i]experience[/i] - not to understand [i]why[/i] certain things are painful, or why pain ever happens at all (the point is to look at pain itself, not its causes or its uses). Everyone understands what pain is in some way, sure - otherwise we couldn't say things like "that really hurt me." But it's one thing to be able to [i]indicate examples[/i] of something, and another to [i]define[/i] it in a more structured way (if someone says to me "whenever I'm around [NAME] it feels like I have butterflies in my stomach," I can reply: "oh, you must be in love"; that doesn't mean I can DEFINE what love is). I'm not really up for that in a message board post, but I can make some indications.

First of all, let's just deal with pain in the sense of the "pain" of loss, the "pain" of embarrassment, and so on, rather than the "pain" of (for example) getting hit in the head. I can feel pain in the latter sense (call this nerve pain) all day without feeling it in the former (call this emotional pain). Pain, as we take it here, is an emotion ("no kidding!"). Obviously. But emotions, moods, dispositions, and so on, [i]as experienced by myself[/i], aren't like other kinds of facts: to say "she's mad" is basically similar to "she's from Canada" (both just express that some object is a certain way), but [i]my[/i] being mad is something else. I don't at all experience anger as just a fact attached to an object (myself). I'm somehow [i]in[/i] the anger; I inhabit it in a way similar to how I inhabit my body. Being angry has to do with the way in which I deal with other things around me (angrily) - experientially it might actually make more sense to say that the [i]world[/i] is angry rather than me (I only really say "I'm angry" when I'm in a fairly reflective kind of anger; I'm more likely to say "this is outrageous," etc.). My anger may be focused on something particular (say, the car that cut me off), but more basically it's going to involve how I take the whole world.

But not all emotions work the same - not only in the sense that they "twist" the world in different ways, but that they orient me differently [i]temporally[/i]. Emotions have to do with TIME. Take fear: in a certain sense I can be afraid of things immediately in front of me, but this isn't really where the [i]emphasis[/i] of fear falls. In the doctor's office to get a shot, I'm not afraid of the needle as it is AT THAT MOMENT (no matter how sharp it is): I'm afraid of what the needle's GOING to do to me. But not the sting itself. In stage fright, what I'm afraid of is the general insecurity and the unknown quality of the situation, not any single possibility. I'm not afraid of the [i]particular[/i] effect (if I know what shots are like, they're less scary), I'm afraid because I don't really know what's going to happen. The upshot of all this: I never become "afraid" of something in the past (I can be "unnerved" by a past situation, maybe, but that's not the same thing). In any case, this unseats the common sense idea that we're affected most by what's going on NOW; under many circumstances we can be far more strongly bound by what we see coming towards us, or what we see going away.

Pain, it seems to me, leans in the direction opposite of fear. Pain dwells with the past, with what has already gone. I am never hurt by events that haven't yet taken place - if I learn that my lover plans to leave me, the pain I feel is from her betrayal already having taken place (even if it hasn't been "finalized"). Take another situation: suppose, as I sit here writing this, that I receive a phone call telling me that my best friend has died. With this, would I feel hurt? Would I wail and cry without a second having gone past? NO - which will seem very strange. More likely, I feel an uncanny kind of calm (the eye of a storm). At most, I might be shocked and I might stumble over my words a bit as I thank the person who tells me and hang up. As I look around my room, I might perhaps be struck by the [i]sameness[/i] of it: the walls having the same shade of white as before, the wall clock moving at its usual speed. Most of all, I wonder about myself. I try to think of my friend and her death, and fail - somehow all that comes to mind is the party scheduled at her place for tuesday night, and how I haven't bought any food for it yet. I wonder how it is that I'm not feeling any grief, or anything at all, even though I should be. I might even still be in a state where I can finish the work I'm doing. None of this is "denial" - my problem has nothing to do with the fact that I don't know what's happened or that I'm denying it, but that the event - and my friend - [i]haven't yet moved into the past[/i]. The death is still too PRESENT - the taint of the "now" somehow prevents me from feeling the pain I know is proper. Only after her death has properly become past, only when I can [i]remember[/i] her, do I experience the loss and the grief. It can take five seconds, it can take days. In any case, I think this is representative of something generally true: pain only happens in [i]remembering[/i].

Anyways this started wandering into tl;dr territory a couple of paragraphs ago, and that's about all I have to add to this (Engel - it may not seem like it, but everything I've said here is directed to your post). I won't try to talk about pain as something good or bad; I take it as a [i]fact[/i], and that's all. Truthfully I don't know if the experience of painful remembrance - taking pain now as part of a whole [i]situation[/i], not as something by itself (like in the first paragraph above) - leads to growth or regression or what. I guess it's often true that pain can help you bond with others (although I don't know how I feel about the idea of picking up dates from one's support group). I don't really know the best ways to cope with pain. I'm not a psychologist and I can't really give you the statistics on any of this stuff. All I can do, really, is try to [I]describe[/I] it, and (were this not too long already) to ask what this means about how I encounter the world around me, how I relate to others, about time above all, and the basic state of being human. None of this is "useful," in that it can be applied somewhere to get good results. "What [i]is[/i] pain?", not "how do I deal with pain?" or "what causes pain?" etc. - that question seems to get us nowhere. It produces no effects: at best it only offers a clear view of what is [I]given[/I] in pain. All it can do is talk about the obvious. Which is often much more difficult than you would think: "One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one?s eyes."[/SIZE]

[Sojiro47]

[quote name='Fasteriskhead][SIZE=1]Pain, I think, has nothing to do with growth. Think of a situation where I, say, break up with a significant other. I don't learn anything (or "grow") at all from the [i]pain[/i] of the breakup; if I learn something or become less naive it's from the breakup [i]itself[/i], from thinking about why it happened, where it started, etc.. I don't become stronger or "less resistant" to pain, either - things like breakups never get easier, at best I can only learn how to handle them better. The idea that pain makes us grow seems to me like an after-the-fact justification for really awful feelings that need to be explained and given reason [i]somehow[/i'], even if those reasons have nothing to do with the actual, concrete experience of hurt.[/SIZE][/quote]
[font=impact]Well, if you were the one doing the breaking up, I'd say that you are right, you won't learn anything. But if you were the one who was [i]dumped[/i], there's quite abit to learn.

I believe that pain's existance is like school. People don't want to go through it, but they begin to realize that they need it and won't become anything more than a big kid with out it.

Losing people is also nessissary sometimes. Whether it is to death or love, we [b]all[/b] will lose people, there's nothing yo can do about it. But it will make use stronger. The trick, though, is to learn how to channel and understand the pain in order to learn from it. once you've got that ability, the pain will still hurt, but it will help it hurt less in the future.[/font]

[Guest Copycatalyst]

Pain has everything to do with growth. If you are in pain, you're shackling yourself somewhere, and it's all your fault. Pain is a response that tells you [i]stop doing that[/i]. If you want to deny that that's your deal. Take care.